The Economics of Happiness

The Economics of Happiness Insights on globalization from a novel approach Carol Graham Introduction The economics of happiness is an approach to assessing welfare which combines the techniques typically used by economists with those more commonly used by psychologists. It relies on surveys of the reported well- being of hundreds of thousands of individuals across countries and conti- nents. It also relies on more expansive notions of utility than does conventional economics, highlighting the role of non-income factors that affect well-being. It is well suited to informing questions in areas where revealed preferences provide limited information, such as the welfare effects of inequality and of macroeconomic policies such as inflation and unemployment. One such question is the gap between economists’ assessments of the aggregate benefits of the globalization process and the more pessimistic assessments that are typical of the general public (see Rodrik, 1997; O’Rourke and Sinott, 2002; and Graham and Pettinato, 2002).1 Standard analyses based on aggregate, income-based measures provide important benchmarks for assessing the impact of globalization on poverty Carol Graham is Senior Fellow in the Economic Studies Program at The Brookings Institution and Professor of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. The paper draws heavily on a chapter in the forthcoming edition of the New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, edited by Steven Durlauf and Larry Blume, and is adapted and reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan. The author would like to thank Henry Aaron, Richard Easterlin, Joshua Epstein, Andrew Felton, Andrew Oswald, and George Perry for helpful comments. 1 There is some evidence that attitudes about globalization are more negative among the publics in developed than in most developing countries. (Rodrik, 1997). O’Rourke and Sinott (2002) find that public support for free trade is higher among skilled than unskilled labor in the developed economies; Graham and Pettinato (2002) find a similar trend for respondents in Latin America. The Pew Global Attitudes survey (2002), meanwhile, which surveyed 38,000 people in 44 nations (both developing and developed), found that the majority of respondents in the poll thought highly of international organizations, such as the WTO, and multinational corporations, while anti-globalization protestors were held in low esteem. At the same time, the majority of the public felt that many of the problems that the protestors highlight, such as the availability of jobs and the gap between the rich and the poor, are worsening. WORLD ECONOMICS • Vol. 6 • No. 3 • July–September 2005 41 Carol Graham and inequality. This paper highlights the extent to which a novel approach—the economics of happiness—provides alternative measures of well-being, which in turn highlight aspects of the process that also matter to welfare. These include the insecurity caused by short-term movements in and out of poverty; the welfare effects of effects of changes in the dis- tribution over the life or earnings cycle and/or distributional shifts at the sector, cohort, and neighborhood level; and changes in reported well-being that are driven by the widespread increase of global information and its effects on local reference norms. The economics of happiness—the approach While psychologists have been using surveys of reported well-being to study happiness for years, economists only recently ventured into this arena. Early economists and philosophers, ranging from Aristotle to Bentham, Mill, and Smith, incorporated the pursuit of happiness in their work. Yet as economics grew more rigorous and quantitative, more parsi- monious definitions of welfare took hold. Utility was taken to depend only on income as mediated by individual choices or preferences within a rational individual’s monetary budget constraint. Even within a more orthodox framework, focusing purely on income can miss key elements of welfare—as numerous economists have noted over time. People have different preferences for material and non-material goods. They may choose a lower paying but more personally rewarding job, for example. They are nonetheless acting to maximize utility in a clas- sically Walrasian sense. The study of happiness or subjective well-being is part of a more general move in economics that challenges these narrow assumptions. The introduction of bounded rationality and the establishment of behavioral economics, for example, have opened new lines of research. Happiness economics—which represents one new direction—relies on more expansive notions of utility and welfare, including interdependent utility func- tions, procedural utility, and the interaction between rational and non-rational influences in determining economic behavior. Richard Easterlin was the first modern economist to re-visit the concept of happiness, beginning in the early 1970s. More generalized interest took hold in the late 1990s (see, among others, Easterlin, 1974, 2003; 42 WORLD ECONOMICS • Vol. 6 • No. 3 • July–September 2005 The Economics of Happiness Blanchflower and Oswald, 2004; Clark and Oswald, 1994; Frey and Stutzer, 2002a; Graham and Pettinato, 2002; Layard, 2005). The economics of happiness does not purport to replace income-based measures of welfare, but instead to complement them with broader measures of well-being. These measures are based on the results of large-scale surveys, across countries and over time, of hundreds of thousands of individuals who are asked to assess their own welfare. The surveys provide information about the importance of a range of factors which affect well- being, including income but also others such as health, marital and employment status, and civic trust. The approach, which relies on expressed preferences rather than on revealed choices, is particularly well suited to answering questions in areas where a revealed preferences approach provides limited information. Indeed, it often uncovers discrepancies between expressed and revealed preferences. The latter cannot fully gauge the welfare effects of particular policies or institutional arrangements which individuals are powerless to change. Examples of these include the welfare effects of inequality, envi- ronmental degradation, and macroeconomic policies such as inflation and unemployment. Sen’s capabilities-based approach to poverty, for example, highlights the lack of capacity of the poor to make choices or to take cer- tain actions. In many of his writings, he criticizes economists’ excessive focus on choice as a sole indicator of human behavior (Sen, 1995). Understanding the limits to choice approaches—and willingness to use the information contained in preferences expressed in surveys—may help us better understand the divergence between economists’ generally posi- tive assessments of the globalization process and those of the typical lay- man or woman experiencing the process. While the former are based on standard measures of the aggregate benefits of the process, the latter tend to be based on individual experiences. These are influenced by changes in opportunity sets and reward structures, which in turn vary across cohorts and can bring new vulnerabilities and dislocation for many individuals. As these changes are driven by forces which individuals are powerless to influence, a choice approach has limits in capturing their welfare effects. Another area where a choice approach is limited and happiness surveys can shed light is the welfare effects of addictive behaviors such as smok- ing and drug abuse. It can broaden our understanding of excessive con- sumption and/or variance in response to public health information across WORLD ECONOMICS • Vol. 6 • No. 3 • July–September 2005 43 Carol Graham age and income cohorts, for example (as in the case of obesity, which is increasingly recognized as a major public health problem in the U.S.). Happiness surveys are based on questions in which the individual is asked “generally speaking, how happy are you with your life?” or “how satisfied are you with your life?”, with possible answers on a four to seven point scale.2 This approach presents several methodological challenges. Critics used to defining welfare or utility in material or income terms bemoan the lack of precise definition in these questions (for a fuller description of these, see Bertrand and Mullanaithan, 2001; Frey and Stutzer, 2002b). To minimize order bias, for example, happiness questions must be placed at the beginning of surveys. As with all economic meas- urements, the answer of any specific individual may be biased by idiosyn- cratic, unobserved events. Bias in answers to happiness surveys can also result from unobserved personality traits and correlated measurement errors (which can be corrected via individual fixed effects if and when panel data are available). Other concerns about correlated unobserved variables are common to all economic disciplines. Accuracy in reporting is another issue in using perceptions data. Responses can be very biased by the phrasing or the placement of questions in the survey. Another problem in reporting is bias introduced by different or changing reference norms. If you ask people how much income would they need to make ends meet, and/or to be happy, they usually base their answers on their existing income and increase it by some proportion, regardless of the absolute level.3 Despite the potential pitfalls, cross sections of large samples across countries and over time find remarkably consistent

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